Nicholas Tepper

No innovation in quest design. The game has a 'story first' focus with hours of non-voiced cutscenes intermingled with escort quests, go talk to 3 people, go comfort 3 people, go find 3 people, go get ice cream for 3 people. This is the most bored I have ever been with the launch of a new expansion for any mmo. The Good: I think pictomancer is fun and well designed for class identity. For anyone that enjoys 30+ hours of reading followed by fetch quests followed by reading, this will be your heaven. MCH finally has weapon skins that don't look like garbage. The Bad: Viper is a literal reaper copy. The first half of the story was slow, boring, filled with exposition, and riddled with the same characters and same tropes we have seen time and time again over the past 10 years. There isn't an original bone in this expansion. The balance is off, pictomancers are overperforming. The new skills most classes got were just copies of old skills that you get to press one more time, yay! It's not wrong to expect a quality standard from one of the leaders in the mmo industry. I'm not saying get rid of the quest system, but mix it up a bit. At the end of the day, I'm judging this expansion on how much fun I had, which was almost none. The reason that I'm only rating the msq and solo player experience and not any of the high end content is because it's been made clear that 'Single Player MMO" is the direction that they are going with the game. If you're going to do something, at least do it well.